The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for locating computing assets within an organization.
Mapping assets within a building, or even a room, is a tedious, error-prone, and time consuming process. This is especially true with regard to data centers where large numbers of computing resources may be located within the physical premises of a building or room of a building and it is important for administrators to know the whereabouts of such resources.
Currently, the only solution for obtaining the location of data center resources is for a system administrator, or other human personnel, to manually note the exact location coordinates of the resources for every resource or asset. This is an error prone process which requires frequent manual updates possible only if the data center is faithfully monitored for asset changes such as asset relocation, asset removal, and asset addition. With this manual process, the recorded location of assets is difficult to synchronize with events in the data center; the recorded locations are often stale. Even if bar-coding is used to assist this process, the asset records will not match until an administrator scans the assets' barcodes and updates the location information manually.